One or more aspects relate generally to data processing systems and more specifically to hardware compression.
Many compression algorithms, such as LZ77, rely on finding maximum length re-occurring byte sequences. The Deflate standard defines a minimum 3 bytes length backward reference. Therefore, hash functions must calculate the addresses to access a hash table based on a series of 3 bytes. This means any n-byte sequence that starts with the same 3 bytes will result in the same address, which will cause hash collisions, and thus, reducing the compression ratio.